Wednesday 19th June

 Another day passes....

The weather is improving...

I'm still cancelling everything in my diary, day by day, as I know it is the sensible thing to do. Tomorrow I have three events; a scheduled piano lesson in the morning, a rescheduled piano lesson (the student taking a Grade 6 piano exam in ten days time) and the Home Group Zoom meetup in the evening. I can truncate the morning lesson to just fifteen minutes, teach the afternoon lesson, and then bale out of the evening zoom meeting by setting someone else to be the 'host' after we start. That will have to do!

Meanwhile I started Arthur Ransome's 'We didn't mean to go to see' yesterday evening. This morning I stayed in bed reading until I finished it! I ALWAYS cry at the end, even though I knew the ending. All's well that ends well.

My father has a nearly complete set of the old green hardbacks, given to him for birthdays and Chrismases when he was a boy. He's kept them, all in a very well read and re-read state, and once I discovered them I too read them over and over.

I used to pass a second-hand book shop as I walked to work back in the 1980s, and the bookseller used to keep copies back for me when he found them. At about £7 each they were really too expensive for me, but... and oh, the difficulty of choosing just one when he had several on the shelf sometimes...

The old green hardbacks all have maps inside the covers. I have just started reading 'Winter Holiday' which could be only the second or third in the series, because Dick and Dorothea have not met the Swallows and Amazons yet.

Jigsaw

It's coming along nicely. It's always satisfying when all the disparate chunks start joining up. There are still a vast number of pieces left in the box, but it's getting easier to see where they might fit.... or not! The bits spread out on the sky are all to do with some cottages, but which ones? The cottages on the right or the left... it's all rather confusing!